Managing your talent pool using an ATS: Behind the Scenes of an Applicant Tracking System

An applicant tracking system is a great way to collate your candidate’s data. But, once your talent pool has a good level of candidates, how can you make sure you are getting the most of out it?

An ATS offers a range of elements and functions, which means can utilise of your talent pool as much as possible. When looking to purchase an ATS, think about what your goals are with the pool of candidates you have before building it.

To further develop your knowledge of what you should be expecting from your applicant tracking system and talent pooling, we look behind the scenes to focus on the key features to manage and look for.

Reporting

Your ATS should provide you with the ability to create reports on the candidates in your database. The reports you pull on should include a variety of aspects, including application source, skill sector, their location and more.

Bulk assign actions

As the candidates in your talent pool increase in numbers, regular communication becomes difficult. This is where your ATS should give you the capacity to carry out bulk actions, such as emailing the whole pool about new jobs.

Creating categories

So your candidate attraction methods are working and you have yourself a huge talent pool; now it is a case of managing it. To make it easier, break your candidates up into categories. These could include location, skill set, industry sector and much more.

Smart searching

Your ATS will save you from manually reviewing CVs, scanning for that all important criteria that you require. Recruitment software possesses a functionality which allows you to use multiple Boolean search strings, for smarter searching. What an applicant tracking system enables you to do is search the whole talent pool, for keywords within CVs, allowing you to pull out candidates for your recruiting.

Get it sorted

The likelihood is that in time, some of the data in your talent pool will become irrelevant, which is where you need to be able to cleanse the data in a straight forward way. An ATS will allow you to sort the candidate applications by date, removing those that have been in for a certain period of time.

From this, you could email candidates to check if they still want to be contained within your database, using a bulk action tool.

An ATS could be the right solution if you are looking for a reliable platform where talent pools are easily manageable and reports can be generated simply. These are only the start of what an applicant tracking system can offer, encouraging a streamlined recruitment process.

Want to learn more? Find out what Webrecruit Ireland’s recruitment technology can do for you here.